Why Being Lazy Is Good for a Product Manager (no, really)
“I choose a lazy person to do a hard job, because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.”— often attributed to Bill Gates… but the best evidence traces this idea back to industrial-efficiency guru Frank Gilbreth and a 1947 Senate testimony by Chrysler exec Clarence Bleicher. (Quote Investigator)
When a CEO hears “lazy PM,” the spidey-senses tingle. Hustle culture says the first one in and the last one out wins. But strategic laziness—the kind that strips away busywork, automates the boring bits, and focuses on high-leverage decisions—regularly beats raw effort. This is a tongue-in-cheek defense of the “lazy” Product Manager who ships more by doing less (and sleeps better, too).
The Virtue of Strategic Laziness
Programmers have admitted it for decades. Larry Wall famously called the three virtues of a great programmer “laziness, impatience, and hubris.” Translation: if a task is tedious, automate it; if a process is slow, streamline it. (O'Reilly Media)
Hackers agree. As one Hacker News commenter put it, “Automate whatever feels boring for you.” (Because we both know you’ll do it once and never again.) (Hacker News) Another HN voice calls this productive laziness: “A good engineer is a bit lazy… they think about how to simplify, or isolate, or manage complexity.” (Hacker News)
History backs the thesis. Gilbreth’s motion studies reduced bricklaying from ~18 motions to as few as 5–6, letting workers lay 2–3× more bricks per hour—because the “laziest” method often is the most efficient. (Internet Archive, LSU Faculty)
And the line so often hung on Bill Gates? Quote Investigator finds no solid evidence he said it; the cleanest early formulation is from Clarence Bleicher (1947): “Put a lazy man on a tough job and he’ll find an easy way in ten days.”(Quote Investigator)
Bottom line: good lazy ≠ not doing your job; good lazy = doing only the parts that matter, the easiest way that works.
Delegate to the Robots (and Scripts)
“Lazy” PMs are allergic to repeatable manual tasks. They rig dashboards to self-refresh, templates to self-populate, and bots to ferry data across tools—so they can spend time on deciding, not copy-pasting.
Reddit has receipts. One viral confession:
“In about a week I wrote a script that performed my entire job… scans the drive for new files, hashes them, transfers to the cloud, hashes again for fidelity… I clock in, play video games or do whatever, check logs for ten minutes, and clock out.” (Reddit)
(We’re not endorsing the Xbox part—just the “do it once, reap forever” energy.)
HN’s “do-nothing scripting” threads are full of the same vibe: automate the annoying parts first; your future self will thank you. (Hacker News)
Try this:
If a weekly update takes >10 minutes, script it from Jira/Linear/GA.
If support asks the same five questions, ship an FAQ/flow and measure deflection.
If your stand-up reads like a courtroom transcript, move to async check-ins with a short “blockers only” live huddle
Ruthless Prioritization: Doing Less, Winning More
A “lazy” PM treats focus like a superpower. Steve Jobs’ short version: “Innovation is saying ‘no’ to 1,000 things.”(sebastiaanvanderlans.com, zurb.com)
Pandora operationalized this with a killer prompt:“What would be stupid not to do in the next 90 days?”Ask it every quarter and watch half the nice-to-haves melt away. (First Round)
Reddit’s r/ProductManagement is blunt: “The most common advice to PMs is learn to say no… but the hard part is how.” (Answer: show trade-offs, ladder back to goals, and time-box experiments.) (Reddit)
Try this:
Cap each sprint to one hand’s worth of priorities. If you need a second hand, you’re lying to yourself. (Pandora vibes.) (First Round)
Put a “Kill List” on the roadmap: features/processes you’ll stop doing to buy back capacity.
The Art of “No” (Said Nicely)
Jeff Bezos gave leaders the time-saving phrase: “Disagree and commit.” When endless debate stalls, pick a direction and go. It “will save a lot of time.” (Amazon News)
Your job isn’t to win arguments; it’s to protect focus. On Reddit, one PM warns that a blunt no burns bridges; framing the trade-off and aligning to outcomes works better than hard vetoes. (Yes-and → data → decision.) (Reddit)
Try this templated reply:“Love the idea. To ship it this quarter we’d drop X and Y (impact ↓AARRR metric by ~B%). If your team can live with that swap, I’ll schedule a spike next week.”
Empower Others: The Laziest Superpower
William McKnight’s management rule at 3M was wonderfully lazy: “Hire good people and leave them alone.” Delegate responsibility, encourage initiative, don’t punish honest mistakes. (3M)
David Ogilvy went further: “If each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, we shall become a company of giants.” In PM terms: staff for ownership, not permission. (Ogilvy)
Try this:
Push decisions to the edges: engineering chooses how, design owns usability, PM owns what/why/when.
Replace sign-offs with published guardrails (e.g., launch criteria, definition of “small bet,” min-bar for experiments).
Simplify Everything (Especially Complex Systems)
Complexity taxes every sprint forever. The “lazy” instinct is to remove steps until the value breaks—then add one back.
Even HN’s skeptics of hero-coding concede this: “A good engineer is a bit lazy… they think about how to simplify or, if that fails, manage complexity.” Your architecture (and roadmap) should feel the same. (Hacker News)
Try this:
Run Subtraction DORAs: in each retro, kill one step, one field, one policy, or one zombie feature.
Before building, hunt for the cheapest proxy: a Zapier stitch, a spreadsheet, a concierge test.
Internet Wisdom (a.k.a. Quotes to Tape Above Your Kanban)
“Automate whatever feels boring.” — HN commenter (amen). (Hacker News)
“Do-nothing scripts let you automate the most annoying parts and stay up-to-date.” — HN thread summary. (Hacker News)
“I clock in, play games, check logs 10 minutes a day.” — Reddit automation confessional. (Replace “games” with “strategy” and we’re golden.) (Reddit)
“Learn to say no—but master how to say it.” — r/ProductManagement. (Reddit)
“Disagree and commit… this phrase will save a lot of time.” — Jeff Bezos. (Amazon News)
“Hire good people and leave them alone.” — William McKnight, 3M. (3M)
A Lazy PM’s Playbook (steal this)
Automate your statusHook issue states to release notes and weekly roll-ups. If it takes longer to write than to read, you’re doing it wrong. (HN would automate it.) (Hacker News)
Quarterly “Stupid-Not-To-Do” reviewShortlist 3 initiatives you’d be foolish not to ship in 90 days; fund those, ice the rest. (Pandora’s trick.) (First Round)
One-pager product briefsReplace 20-page PRDs with a tight one-pager + Figma. If stakeholders can’t understand the “why,” adding 19 pages won’t help.
Guardrail metricsFor every bet, track one upside metric and one “do no harm” metric. If either blinks red, stop. Lazy PMs love auto-stop rules.
Kill something monthlyDead code, dead process, dead meeting. Gilbreth would approve. (Internet Archive)
Lazy ≠ Unmotivated. It’s Leverage.
The clever-and-lazy archetype has even been (apocryphally) praised in military lore: the people “clever and lazy” are fit for the highest command—they have time to think. (The attribution is debated, but the idea endures.) (Quote Investigator)
That’s the punchline: the “lazy” PM isn’t avoiding outcomes—only inefficient paths to them. They conserve calories for judgment, trade-offs, and narrative. They design a system where the team can ship without mom-PM hovering, then they step back and—gasp—go home on time.
CEO test: don’t measure your PM by visible effort. Measure by focus, cycle time, and outcomes. If the scoreboard lights up while your PM looks strangely relaxed, congratulations: you hired a pro.
TL;DR for the busy (and the lazy)
Automate the boring stuff; use your Saturdays for life, not spreadsheets. (Hacker News)
Ask “What would be stupid not to do in 90 days?” and cut the rest. (First Round)
Say “no” nicely, or disagree and commit to keep velocity high. (Amazon News)
Remember: “Bill Gates’ lazy quote” is meme-worthy but misattributed—the spirit is real, the citation isn’t. (Quote Investigator)
Now close that extra 45-minute meeting titled “Quick Sync,” and go ship the one thing you’d be stupid not to.